The Storms model

[Emmarainbow]

That's very pretty. I'm sure I wouldn't feel about being called 'grey a' if I could be a 'lilac a'.

[Omnes et Nihil]

Does anyone know about Kinsey's concept of eroticism and the methods he used to calculate it? Storms seems to be using his language.

Defining eroticism becomes even more problematic when you include fantasies about other people rather than just fantasies about sex with other people. What exactly has to happen in your head when looking at a person or representation of a person -- or even something completely impersonal -- for it to qualify as an erotic reaction? These things can get maddeningly abstract.

Kinsey was at the height of behaviourism... He sidestepped all of that. Most of his work actually was interviewing people about how often they performed physical act of _______ as well as demographic info. The famous "Kinsey scale" didn't define eroticism. He did use "erotic response" to mean (physical / physiological) sexual response. The scale asked about how often sexual contact and fantasies had to do with members of the same sex and of the other sex. Actually, on the original Kinsey scale, there was an X outside the 0-10 range for people who didn't have any sexual contact or fantasies. But people tend to forget about that.

The X doesn't really apply to asexuality as we would mean it though. He would have rejected the idea-- Kinsey himself didn't believe in sexual orientation the way we use it today. He would have thought all of these discussions are complete non-sense, and was quite clear about that. He believed "homosexual" and "heterosexual" to be adjectives, and never nouns. In his 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Kinsey, Pomeroy & Martin) he said so explicitly. He argued vehemently against the idea that "homosexual males and females are discretely different from persons who merely have homosexual experience, or who react sometimes to homosexual stimuli." (p.616). And he continued (p.617):

"It would encourage clearer thinking on these matters if persons were not characterized as heterosexual or homosexual, but as individuals who have had certain amounts of heterosexual experience and certain amounts of homosexual experience. Instead of using these terms as substantives which stand for persons, or even as adjectives to describe persons, they may better be used to describe the nature of the overt sexual relations, or of the stimuli to which an individual erotically responds."

The danger with these sorts of concepts is that they can easily be boiled down to measures of sexual response in the lab. There have been many experiments, for instance, measuring orientation by showing subjects sexual images of different sexes while monitoring blood flow to the genitalia. Would you agree with this as an objective measure? Would you agree to be hooked up for such a test if someone wanted to do a study on us? It's likely to come up sooner or later.

I think if anyone is hooking people's brains or genitals (or any other body part) up to equipment, trying to measure orientation... they're completely missing the point. The idea of "sexual orientation" as an objective physiologically-based construct doesn't even make any sense. But I won't get into that here.

I will say that sexual orientation is a historically and culturally contingent concept. These are socially relevant and meaningful categories dealing with how we organsie our desires and our interactions with other people.

Sexual orientation as we know came about in the early 20th century. Long story short, the idea of "sexual orientation" as a characteristic that applies to all (or most) people didn't really come into existence until Freud. Sort of unintentional effect-- he was really the first to "explain" heterosexuality. Whether his psychosexual developmental theories make any sense or hold any truth is entirely beside the point. The historical effect was the lingering idea that people have a relatively stable (though possible changeable) thing characteristic: gender of people to whom one is attracted sexually. [Lots of people before Freud... pretty much all starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, tied to the industrial revolution.. and initially only in industrialised places. Early politically pro-gay "activist" type people who did research didn't have the idea framed in any way we would recognise now, and their ideas didin't catch on.]

[Mr. Paradox]

I'd love to see you write a blog post on Kinsey and us, Omnes.

I find it interesting that as revered as Kinsey is now, his own definitions kind of got left by the wayside. The orientation-minded sexual revolution took his data and ran with it. His only holdouts today are the "everyone's really bisexual" crowd, who, along with being generally annoying, misread him just as badly.

Kinsey himself didn't believe in sexual orientation the way we use it today. He would have thought all of these discussions are complete non-sense, and was quite clear about that. He believed "homosexual" and "heterosexual" to be adjectives, and never nouns.

Judging by the discussion we're having on descriptive and prescriptive labels, I think a lot of us are actually speaking his language here. But you could still argue against orientation being nonsense by pointing out, as you did on that thread, that orientations are first and foremost politically useful labels.

[spin]

I'd also love to see a blog post with more informed details about Kinsey's work, Omnes. I must say I agree with the idea of orientations being adjectives and not nouns. I try to use it "asexual" a descriptor more than a label.

So, what can we take away from Storms' model and language? Is "eroticism" something we want to consider as a measure or determining factor or is there a better way to put it?

[Shockwave]

I think we should find a different term to use, eroticism has more to do with arousal than attraction (for example, many asexual engage in autoerotic behavior).

[pretzelboy]

The way that Storms seemed to use to word "eroticism" seemed to have more to do with attraction and fantasy than with arrousal, so even if we modify the language, I think his general concept of what is being measured doesn't need much modification. (Unlike people who want to base sexual orientation based on phallic response to sexual images.) I think of it more as who we "eroticize" as partners.

[School Of Fish]

In regards to what model to use to describe human sexuality, and whether or not those with object or other fetishes should be considered asexual or not, there was a recent film I saw when I was tagging along with Deladangerous to one of her college courses.

The class was the sociology of sex, and the film was about gender identity as well as orientation, and how in non-western cultures, gender and orientation can often be much more fluid.

The conclusion was ultimately reached that each individual has their own sexual orientation.

I rather like that model, that each person has a unique sexual orientation. It's not as useful when you want to talk about humans in large scale matters, but it is certainly more accurate.

[Omnes et Nihil]

I'd also love to see a blog post with more informed details about Kinsey's work, Omnes. I must say I agree with the idea of orientations being adjectives and not nouns. I try to use it "asexual" a descriptor more than a label.

The thing about Kinsey is that he didn't just use the terms as descriptive, but it was sort of one step further. We tend to think about sexual orientation as a relatively stable personal characteristic these days-- even if sexuality is fluid, and things can change, and boundaries move, there is some stability about it. For Kinsey, that would have been all purely contingent or incidental. Like describing people who typically ride their bikes to work, as opposed to taking the bus. No reason why people can't just up and switch tomorrow. That's not really how people think about sexuality.

Kinsey was a behaviorist-- he talked about how (heterosexual) men paying a (female) prostitute to have sex with their homosexual friend wasn't empirically effective in changing said homosexual man, but he didn't doubt the basic idea that homosexual (and heterosexual, or bisexual for that matter) people could change given the right situations, reinforcement patterns. That there was nothing internal about all of this.

[School Of Fish]

That's not really how people think about sexuality.

Ah, but there's an error to made there. Taking cultural norms and frames and taking them to be truth simply because they are widely held.

People who think about sexuality at all usually do so in a fixed fashion, and these people are either usually western, or subject to western thought or colonization.

There are many places where sexuality is not thought about, period.

I wish I could remember, I think it was Haiti, there was an example from Dela's sex class, where there is no such thing as gay or straight, people just pick who they like at the time.

Perhaps the ideas of "gay" or "straight" are simply products of western thought, in which homosexuality was a deviation from the norm.

[Omnes et Nihil]

That's not really how people think about sexuality.

Perhaps the ideas of "gay" or "straight" are simply products of western thought, in which homosexuality was a deviation from the norm.

Undoubtedly. And inextricably linked with industrialisation actually. If you're interested, heterosexuality was invented in 1868 in Germany. That wasn't my point.

My point was that when people describe themselves as "asexual" and otherwise use labels descriptively, they aren't doing what Kinsey was doing. It's a different activity, predicated on different assumptions about the nature of sexuality.

[Mysteria]

If you're interested, heterosexuality was invented in 1868 in Germany.

Well, I don't know about School of Fish, but I'm interested. I'd like to hear more about this.

[Gadfly-in-Chief]

And homosexuality was conceived in Paris in the 1260s, and born in Vienna 600 or so years later.......???

[ghosts]

Omnes would know way more about these kinds of things than I would, I'm sure! But yeah, going along that whole line of thought/discussion, the ways in which people identify seem pretty culture/time-specific to me.

It seems like a lot of things changed with industrialization? Same with "romance," relationships in general...

[Omnes et Nihil]

If you're interested, heterosexuality was invented in 1868 in Germany.

Well, I don't know about School of Fish, but I'm interested. I'd like to hear more about this.

Clearly, the statement is a little ironic. I don't for a moment mean that people didn't have romantic/sexual/legal partner relationships before the nineteenth century. And when it was invented, the idea didn't quite match up to what we think of today... but it's still credited as the appearance of heterosexuality, and the first description recorded of "normal" people in that context.

Well very long story short... for many many reasons, mid nineteenth century Germany area, moving toward adopting "unnatural fornication" law, prohibiting all forms of sexual contact that were not strictly for reproductive purposes. Now, although most of the things bound to be prohibited were actually between heterosexual partners, obviously all sexual acts between people of the same sex would be made illegal. And the easiest logistically to police. It's pretty hard to prove that a husband and wife are having some kind of non-penile-vaginal-penetrative sex. It's a lot easier to prove that two guys are having some kind of sex.

Result: a bunch of mid-nineteenth century German guys (many of whom were open about being involved with other guys) were outspoken against this law, and took up writing about people being inclined to have relationships with people of the same sex. As a result... they needed also to talk about people inclined to have relationships with people of the "other" sex. [He personally identified this way, and this was no secret to anyone.]

A lot of the writing from this era mixed gender identity of the person and gender identity of the type of people to whom one is attracted. But that's another story.

Karl Ulrichs actually had a word for people who are attracted to people of the opposite sex around time too, but it was quite different in meaning from heterosexuality, because to him this was explicitly tied to gender-- part of being a man was being attracted to women, and part of being a woman was being attracted to men... and so men who experienced attraction to other men were somehow part woman spiritually, and women who experienced attraction to other women were part men spiritually: both were of the third gender.

Anyway, around the same time, a couple years later, Karl-Maria Kertbeny (born Benkert) basically invented heterosexuality (describing specifically attractions). His concept of heterosexuality was specific contrast to men who are inclined to have sexual relationships with other men, but not women... and as far as he was concerned, men who were mostly into women but somehow did stuff sexually with other men were still heterosexual. He also used the words "normalsexual" and "normally sexed" as synonyms of "heterosexual". He used these words because this was intended to describe the majority of the population, and the "normal" population of people who married unproblematically.

[So "bisexuality" was missing from the beginning... and keep in mind this was a context where men and women still married each other for many reasons other than love/attraction/sex... i.e. if you could do the "marriage thing", you generally did.. for basic practical / survival reasons, although that was just starting to change a little bit with industrialisation.]

Kertbeny first expressed the idea of heterosexuality to Ulrichs in a personal letter in 1868, then published it in 1869 in an anonymous pamphlet entitled "Section 143 of the Prussian Penal Code of April 14, 1851 and its Retention as Section 152 in the Draft of a Penal Code for the North-German League"

They don't name political pamphlets like that anymore!

He wrote that heterosexual men and women participate with each other:

"... in so-called natural [procreative] as well as unnatural [non-procreative] coitus. They are also capable of giving themselves over to same-sex excesses. Additionally, normally-sexed [heterosexual]individuals are no less likely to engage in self-defilement [masturbation] if there is insufficient opportunity to satisfy one's drive. And they are equally likely to assault male but especially female minors...; to indulge in incest; to engage in bestiality...; and even to behave depravedly with corpses if their moral self-control does not control their lust. And it is only amongst the normally-sexed that the special breed of so-called "bleeder" occurs, those who, thirsting for blood, can only satisfy their passion by wounding and torturing."